Video post-production a dying industry

Jerry Hahn fondly recalls the days before YouTube and Windows Movie Maker, when video editing was reserved for high-end production companies, each with complex editing bays that ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

No surprise: Hahn, the president of TBC Consoles, got his business off the ground by selling multimonitor editing desk consoles, at up to $100,000 a pop, to New York City post-production companies that once lined the cross streets of Midtown.

Those companies have long since gone dark, forcing Hahn to tweak his business plan as a result, selling lower-cost desk consoles to businesses, some not even remotely associated with the video production industry.

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While the evolution has proven successful for TBC Consoles – sales of the smaller desks have quintupled since 2010 and Hahn recently boosted staff by 25 percent – others in the video world haven’t been so nimble.

Once a bright spot in the New York economy, video post-production services have been on the decline since the early 2000s, when editing software hit the home computer. On the business side, gargantuan desks with arrays of monitors were quickly replaced with a standard high-end computer with two screens.

“Now a guy’s whole system will cost $50,000, so he’s not going to spend $20,000 for a console,” Hahn said.

While cheaper systems might have meant larger profits for video production companies, it didn’t happen. The cheaper software was also easier to use, especially for

those with minimal knowledge of video editing. As a result, businesses and nonprofits that typically farmed out their video production needs began tackling the work in-house.

With less work coming in, many video production companies were forced to close their doors. From 2000 to 2010, the industry saw a 43.2 percent decline in the number of video post-production companies, according to a 2011 report from IBISWorld on the nation’s Top 10 dying industries.

And the dying continues: The number of video post-production companies nationwide, estimated at just under 1,800 as of 2010, is expected to decline by another 38 percent by 2016. Revenue from post-production work is also down almost 25 percent, to $4.27 billion.

The numbers don’t look any rosier closer to home. The New York State Department of Labor projects the Long Island region will lose 310 jobs in the motion picture and sound recording industry by 2018, a 9.8 percent drop.

The industry’s decline comes at a time when more videos are being made than ever before, although less is being spent per video than in years past due to cheaper editing software and online video hosting.

“The companies that make those videos are competing for shrinking budgets in an expanded pool,” said Eric Solomon, cofounder of Huntington-based Milestone Video. “And with video technologies getting less expensive and more widespread, it’s become a perfect storm of the commoditization of video.”

That means video production companies need to reinvent and add new services or face dark screens.

For Solomon, reinvention means partnering with others to launch online service websites with only a hint of video production. His first, dubbed Job Coach and set to launch next month, will supply job seekers with instructional videos from human resources professionals. A second website featuring instructional videos for clueless new parents will follow later this year.

“I’ve got a family and I’m not ready for retirement yet, so I have to reinvent,” Solomon said.